Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Kharagpur will impart training to Indian engineers and scientists in High-Performance Computing (HPC) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) under its new project ‘NSM Nodal Center for training in HPC and AI' from the Department of Science and Technology, Government of India.
The center will focus on manpower creation and upskilling of students, faculty, scientists,
researchers, scientific users in large scale computing across different science domains, IIT Kharagpur said.
“Recent developments in computational techniques in various domains and science and engineering have been strongly linked with efficient utilization of high-performance computing resources. Therefore, it is essential to impart HPC training to the researchers working in the application domain. On the other hand, it is also important that engineers and developers working on HPC understand the requirement posed by the domain experts. We have already conducted an online training program on the basics of HPC along with other nodal centers of CDAC which attracted around 800 students from diverse backgrounds,” Prof. Somnath Roy, principal investigator of the project at IIT Kharagpur, said.
IIT Kharagpur hosts a 1.3 Petaflop supercomputer named Paramshakti. The Institute has set up the Center for Computational and Data Sciences (CCDS) funded by DST to carry out next-generation interdisciplinary research and teaching activities that involve this state-of-the-art HPC platform.
Further, ₹ 55.7 Lakh has been approved for a period of two years as initial funding for the project to run the NSM Nodal center and conduct training programs.
“Our supercomputing facility has enabled a large group of computational scientists for performing large-scale computations within and outside the campus while they are away. We have also organized a training session on GPU computing for users within the Institute in collaboration with Nvidia. More such training programs are also in pipeline,” said Prof. Pabitra Mitra, Head, CCDS, and also principal investigator of the project.
